Five Decisions Your Board Can Make Before Anyone Calls

There's an objection in the paper I published on DeForest that I raise against myself and then answer only halfway. It's about money. A village of 12,000 cannot fund a readiness study on the chance that a developer someday calls, and the answers I offered (regional planning commissions, shared ordinance templates, county planning departments, the occasional planning grant) are all real and all slow.

I want to come back to it, because what I gave there was only part of the story.

Most of what makes a community ready has nothing to do with what it can afford to study.

We have gotten into the habit of describing preparedness as a technical problem. Zoning provisions, capacity analysis, fiscal modeling, interconnection timelines. Those things matter enormously (and, to be clear, I am not equipped to do any of them). But notice what happens when preparedness gets defined that way: it becomes something you buy, which means it becomes something you postpone, which means the first time anybody looks at it is the week a proposal arrives and the clock has already started.

That framing is backwards, and DeForest is the evidence. Look at the four months and ask how much of the damage a missing engineering study actually caused. Very little. The capacity constraint that surfaced in a state determination from January had been true since the first day of the process. Nothing about the infrastructure changed over those months. What changed was who knew, and when. That was a real cost, and it wasn't the one that mattered most.

What mattered most was simpler. By the time residents were told anything, they had a prior question to work through before they could even reach the merits, which was why they were hearing about it now instead of in the spring? Once a room is asking that question, it is not really evaluating a proposal anymore, and no amount of technical work gets you back.

So here is a different starting point. There are five decisions a council or a board can make in an afternoon, with nobody in the room but themselves. Every one of them is free. Every one of them costs more the later it gets made. And not one requires knowing whether a proposal is coming.

What confidentiality you will and won't accept

Put it on paper before the question is live. What you would sign, what you wouldn't, and what you will tell residents regardless of what you sign. Port Washington went ahead without signing one and kept its project, which is the useful half of that example. The other half is that refusing to sign and actually being open are separate commitments, and people will judge you on the second one no matter what you did about the first. I am not arguing you can always say no. I am arguing the terms ought to be yours, decided in a quiet room rather than a crowded one.

When the public learns that something exists

This is the decision I'd put first if I could only get a board to make one. Early developer contact with staff is unremarkable and a prepared community should expect it. What DeForest didn't have was any rule governing the moment that contact stops being private. Pick a number of days after a formal inquiry, decide who makes the notification, and write it down. Nobody there chose to be less transparent. The choice just never got made, so events made it instead, which is how most transparency problems actually happen.

How residents get heard before opposition is the only organized voice

In DeForest there was no structured channel for input until residents built one themselves, and the one they built was oppositional because that is the only kind available when nothing else exists. I want to be careful here, because this is easy to hear as a manipulation and it isn't one. A standing engagement channel does not reduce opposition and it isn't designed to. What it does is make sure opposition isn't the only thing you can hear, and that residents who are curious, or conflicted, or supportive with conditions, have somewhere to be. Very little of the anger in DeForest was about the facility itself. Most of it was about when people found out.

Who you would call, and in what order

Name your advisory team now. Which planner, which municipal attorney, which fiscal and environmental analysts. DeForest did fund outside experts through a reimbursement agreement, which was the right instinct, but it started once the proposal was already moving, so the specialists were still learning the village while the calendar burned. Inside a 120-day statutory window, a team that needs three weeks to get oriented has spent a sixth of your clock on orientation. I'll be direct that I have an interest in that list, and equally direct that I'm not competing for most of the seats on it. That's precisely why helping a room build it is work I can do honestly.

What your officials will actually say

The first time a trustee gets asked about this in a grocery store, there is going to be an answer. The only question is whether it's one the board agreed on. Deciding in advance what you can say, what you don't yet know, and how you'll describe your own process is not message control. It's the difference between five officials describing the same posture and five officials improvising five different ones, which residents read, correctly, as a sign that nobody is driving.

None of those five is a study. They are decisions about how a community intends to behave, and they are available to any board willing to spend an afternoon on them.

I'd go further. The reason DeForest's four months felt inevitable is not that anyone there lacked judgment. It's that a series of decisions got made by circumstance, in sequence, because nobody had made them on purpose beforehand. That is a fixable problem, and it is fixable cheaply, and it is fixable now rather than during.

The technical work is still real and it still arrives with the proposal, funded then, as it usually is. But a community that has settled these five is not starting from zero when that day comes. It is starting from a position, which is a materially different place to stand.

Building the Links That Matter.